The Geography of Inspiration

Over the years I have heard many reasons cited for Ralph Lemon's disbanding his successful modern dance company in 1995 and embarking on the Geography Trilogy. He wanted to break away from habitual structures for dance-making, or to collaborate with artists of other cultures, or to question his own self-image as an American artist of somewhat distant African descent and more immediate Buddhist practice. Nothing on that list is incorrect. But from my perspective as the dramaturg who has collaborated with Lemon since the trilogy's first workshop in 1997, those reasons are all facets of Geography's overarching project—a fundamental questioning and reimagining of the relationship between artist, stage, and audience.

In pursuing that new relationship Lemon had to pull down the foundations on which he had once stood so comfortably. In fact, throughout the trilogy's development, he made himself as uncomfortable as he possibly could. His approach was to "place [him]self in charged and foreign environments"—charged because of the strong relation they had to his cultural history and mythology, foreign because he couldn't function in them with any degree of expertise. Lemon employed this strategy of enforced unease at all stages of his process. His research involved traveling largely unaccompanied to far-flung locations in West Africa, India, Bali, China, and the rural Southern U.S. In the rehearsal room he directed performers from other cultures with little recourse to a shared aesthetic language, and weathered the inevitable miscommunications that followed. And then there were his on-stage choices: in Part 1 he had performers throw rocks at him, threw rocks at his own feet in Part 2, and in Part 3 withstood the blast of a fire hose. Lemon's collaborators periodically wondered at his instinct for artistic masochism. Yet he stuck to his conviction that the discovery of a new relationship to the stage could only occur, if at all, through a process both mentally and physically discomfiting.

As Nicholas Birns has already articulated, Geography is a trilogy of many more than three parts, populated as it is by "paratexts"—smaller independent works that, in retrospect, expose the "undermachinery of art." Lemon's diaries, drawings, photos, web projects, and research events offered him an important respite from the pressing economics of rehearsal-for-performance, during which he could experiment with other modes and motivations for his work. It was crucial for Lemon, in order to open up the mental space he needed, that these works have no essential or promised relationship to the larger performances that would follow.

With Come home Charley Patton the paratexts, in particular the performative research events, took on an even greater importance. Although in many ways Lemon's encounter with the American South was analogous to his encounters with African and Asia—i.e., he had a strong emotional stake in the culture but felt primarily like an outsider—the material was undeniably more charged and personal. Regardless of his outsider status as an urban Northerner in the rural South, he was engaging his own cultural history, and an often-violent history at that. The stakes were accordingly much higher. Looking through the drawings, photos and videos from Come home Charley Patton is watching a man work out his point of view as an artist responding to past events that tend, in all their matter-of-fact horror, to defy an aesthetic response.

An important early step came in 2001, when Lemon began to engage the history of civil rights protests. In searching for an honest reaction to that material, he devised a series of bus-station rituals that tracked the route of the 1961 Freedom Rides. I first saw the documentation of these events at a workshop showing. As Lemon narrated what had happened at each bus station forty years earlier, the video, shot by his daughter Chelsea Lemon Fetzer, revealed what he had chosen to do in response to...